Reply To: Google killed my best page overnight

Yeah, I’d still lean cleanup first too, not some “Google woke up angry” thing. I’ve had pages where I trimmed what I thought was junk and the thing just lost its anchor. Not always right away either — sometimes it hangs around for a bit and then gets re-evaluated. If it was a page that was already doing the job, you can absolutely make it worse by making it too lean. I’d check: – did the page lose any sections that were doing more work than you thought – did internal links change in a way that pulled equity away – did the title/H1/snippet get less aligned after the edits – is it a rankings drop or just CTR falling off If it’s an affiliate review page, Google can be weirdly unforgiving when it thinks the page got less “useful” after a cleanup. Which is annoying, because half the time the cleanup was just removing garbage. But yeah, I wouldn’t assume randomness first. That’s usually the lazy answer people jump to when they don’t want to dig into what changed.